Citizenship on Trial: Suspicion, Silence, and Majoritarian Legality

Key findings from this study

• The study found that judges encode majoritarian domination through doctrines of evidence and reliability that construct minority identities as presumptively fraudulent and foreign.
• The authors demonstrate that courts produce legal invisibility by refusing to record, engage with, or provide reasoning for minority claims, rendering entire populations legally invisible.
• The research reveals that the combination of exercised and withdrawn judicial labour routinises hierarchy in ways that make authoritarianism institutionally stable and legally sanctioned.

Overview

This article examines how majoritarian domination operates through judicial practices in Assam, India, where denationalisation policies threaten millions of residents, particularly Bengali-origin Muslims. The study analysed 1,200+ High Court rulings since 2009 to reveal how judges institutionalise majoritarian control. The theoretical framework distinguishes between exercised judicial labour, which produces suspicion through evidentiary doctrines, and withdrawn judicial labour, which produces silence through non-engagement. Together, these mechanisms render minority populations presumptively fraudulent and legally invisible, rendering authoritarianism durable and legally sanctioned.

Methods and approach

The researchers conducted an unprecedented empirical analysis of 1,200 rulings from Assam's High Court spanning 2009 onwards. The study developed a theoretical prism of legal work to examine how judges encode majoritarian domination through both active and passive judicial conduct. The framework distinguishes between the exercise of judicial labour—visible in doctrinal patterns around evidence and juridical truth—and the withdrawal of judicial labour manifested through non-engagement and silence. This methodological approach enabled systematic documentation of how courts routinise hierarchy through everyday legal practices.

Results

The analysis demonstrates that exercised judicial labour produces suspicion by constructing minority identities as presumptively fraudulent through specific doctrines of evidence and reliability. Withdrawn judicial labour produces legal invisibility as courts refuse to record, engage with, or reason about minority claims. The combination of these mechanisms—suspicion and silence—entrenches majoritarian domination within formally legitimate legal procedures. Courts thereby routinise hierarchy in ways that make authoritarianism both institutionally stable and legally sanctioned rather than politically exceptional.

Implications

The findings reveal how judicial systems can sustain majoritarian domination through quotidian legal practices rather than through exceptional or overtly coercive measures. This insight extends understanding of democratic decline beyond formal institutional collapse or explicit rights violations to encompass the normalisation of hierarchy within courts themselves. The research suggests that studying how courts exercise and withdraw labour offers a productive analytical lens for understanding authoritarianism's legal foundations.

The theoretical framework of legal work has broader relevance for jurisdictions experiencing similar patterns of minoritisation and denationalisation. Courts function not merely as forums for dispute resolution but as sites where state power constitutes subject populations as presumptively criminal or foreign. Understanding these mechanisms is essential for comprehending how democratic backsliding becomes institutionally embedded and legally justified.

The study's methodological approach—systematic analysis of judicial rulings paired with theoretical analysis of judicial conduct—establishes a template for documenting how legal systems produce and entrench domination. This approach permits examination of mechanisms that operate beneath the threshold of explicit discrimination or formal legal change, revealing instead how routine doctrinal choices and procedural silences consolidate power.

Scope and limitations

This summary is based on the study abstract and available metadata. It does not include a full analysis of the complete paper, supplementary materials, or underlying datasets unless explicitly stated. Findings should be interpreted in the context of the original publication.